Niels Bohr — "We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to…"
We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.
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More from Niels Bohr
"The scientist's most important tool is his imagination."
"Only a fool is certain of anything. A wise man is always open to doubt."
"The word 'reality' is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly."
"The very existence of the atom is a miracle."
"The electron is not a 'thing' in the usual sense of the word. It is a system of relationships."
Details
From discussions on communication and the role of language in science.
Date: Mid 20th century
GeneralVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Human beings exist inside language — we cannot step outside it to access pure, unmediated reality. Everything we perceive and think must pass through words and symbols before we can share it. Because language shapes understanding itself, our fundamental challenge is finding words adequate to convey genuine experience and insight across the gap between one mind and another, knowing translation is always imperfect.
Relevance to Niels Bohr
Bohr spent decades wrestling with quantum mechanics, where observation disturbs reality and classical language breaks down describing electron behavior. He championed complementarity — that contradictory descriptions can both be true — precisely because no single framework captures quantum phenomena. His famous debates with Einstein revealed how deeply language constrained physicists' ability to agree on what experiments actually meant.
The era
Bohr worked through the early-to-mid twentieth century, when quantum mechanics shattered classical physics and forced scientists to question whether ordinary language could describe subatomic reality at all. Simultaneously, Wittgenstein and logical positivists were reexamining language's limits in philosophy. This convergence made Bohr's insight urgent: even science, supposedly objective, remained prisoner to the linguistic frameworks humans inherit.
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